Monthly Archives: August 2012

so this is how you swim inward, so this is how you flow outward, so this is how you pray. – Mary Oliver The heavy weight of anxiety surprised me. I had not thought much about what it would mean to go. True, I had avoided making a decision until Mike and my friends called […]

In my mind, surely placed there by a thousand ad campaigns and television shows, the working mom stood by the stove, frazzled, while the kid cried his face off nearby. This was the image I had of what our home life would be like when I went back to work. I was shocked and pleased […]

“Blues” by Elizabeth Alexander I am lazy, the laziest girl in the world. I sleep during the day when I want to, ’til my face is creased and swollen, ’til my lips are dry and hot. I eat as I please: cookies and milk after lunch, butter and sour cream on my baked potato, foods […]

I remember the summer there were thunderstorms every afternoon, the relief I felt when the dark clouds would roll in. As the rain poured on the metal roof of our mobile home, I would sit on my bed and read the Little House books as fast as I could. All too soon, the sun would […]

When I became a mother, I was surprised at how painful breastfeeding was and how much it drained me physically. I would have given almost anything to have a little bit of time without a person hanging off of me. Over my year of nursing, I came to see it as a profoundly spiritual act, […]

We read a book about the sand and the ocean and the birds and the sky to try to prepare Atticus, but he didn’t really know what we were talking about. Just pictures in a book, undifferentiated from Yoda or the dinosaurs that roar. His sweet face was so trusting when he repeated the words […]

I must confess that I am not a huge fan of This American Life. It is a little bit too much for me, like a parody of NPR. Some of the stories are duds, and they go on and on with that music playing and I just want them to be over. Perhaps I don’t […]